Ann Dorland smiled faintly: "It's nothing, really."
"If only Heaven prevents Marjorie Phelps from coming in," thought Wimsey, "I'm going to get it now.... It must have been something, to upset you like this," he pursued aloud, "you're not the kind of woman to be upset about nothing."
"You don't think I am?" She got up and faced him squarely. "He said ... he said ... I imagined things ... he said ... he said I had a mania about sex. I suppose you would call it Freudian, really," she added hastily, flushing an ugly crimson.
"Is that all?" said Wimsey. "I know plenty of people who would take that as a compliment.... But obviously you don't. What exact form of mania did he suggest...?"
"Oh, the gibbering sort that hangs round church doors for curates," she broke out, fiercely. "It's a lie. He did—he did—pretend to—want me and all that. The beast!... I can't tell you the things he said ... and I'd made such a fool of myself...."
She was back on the couch, crying, with large, ugly, streaming tears, and snorting into the cushions. Wimsey sat down beside her.
"Poor kid," he said. This, then, was at the back of Marjorie's mysterious hints, and those scratchcat sneers of Naomi Rushworth's. The girl had wanted love-affairs, that was certain; imagined them perhaps. There had been Ambrose Ledbury. Between the normal and the abnormal, the gulf is deep, but so narrow that misrepresentation is made easy.
"Look here." He put a comforting arm round Ann's heaving shoulders. "This fellow—was it Penberthy, by the way?"
"How did you know?"
"Oh!—the portrait, and lots of things. The things you liked once, and then wanted to hide away and forget. He's a rotter, anyway, for saying that kind of thing—even if it was true, which it isn't. You got to know him at the Rushworth's, I take it—when?"